Creating Technology for Social Change

Fark.com: “News is just a different form of entertainment”

I never thought of Fark.com in terms of media critique because the snarky commentary makes fun of the topic of the story as often as the media that produced it, but founder Drew Curtis sees more in the site’s parsing of the news:

The initial concept [for his book] was to write the funniest stories that ever have been on Fark, but I couldn’t get excited about it. I thought about media patterns, how crap news come into play, how the news uses it, what they use it for, when it comes online and when it doesn’t. Any time there’s a major news event, the amount of crap news drops considerably. The worst weeks for garbage news are the weeks before Labor Day and between Christmas and New Year’s because nobody’s working. I worked on finding a whole bunch of patterns to try to classify these articles. The reaction of journalists who read this was they’re blown away by it because the book pretty much nails it. News is just a different form of entertainment, masquerading as something else.

Drew also reveals some interesting financial information about the site’s advertising revenues in the full interview over at Meet Innovators.